1) Wife would never of allowed it in the house
2) I would never of allowed in the house. Ruin my street cred.
3) Should of been him in the grey and rainbow uniform (buahahahaha) Now that would of been evil!
4) I don’t know. Something funny inserted here.

Thank you, John. This is the most evil and awesome gift I have ever gotten in my life.

I’ve spent a lot of time around velvet paintings (I grew up in the Valley for fuck’s sake) so I know that one of the key elements to any one of these is weird lips. I don’t know why, but it’s a fundamental, load-bearing pillar in the construction of these magnificent works.

In my life, I have owned two velvet Elvii, one velvet Erik Estrada (!) and now a velvet me-as-Wesley.

OK. Now we know what we have to do. At Confluence in Pittsburgh next year, The guest of honor, our own Mr. Scalzi, must be presented with a black velvet painting of his cat-with-bacon picture. I don’t know anyone on the Confluence committee, but I’ll wager someone here does.

Or, maybe even better, a light blue velvet painting of the cover of The Android’s Dream.

You call THAT evil? Next time you see Ed Bryant, ask him about the black velvet painting he brought to Norwescon a few years ago. (Imagine Elvis, in his Suit of Lights, in the heavenly clouds, looking down mournfully on the lights of Vegas… and being comforted by Mr. Spock.)

Part of the genius of the art itself comes from the small errors — the pip is on the wrong collar, the insignia looks as though it was painted by someone who had never seen the show and had never seen it, but merely had it described to him. The lips. The lips! A painting of Lt Crusher on velvet, rendered correctly, would never have worked.

In commissioning such a work, did you need to steer him to make such ridiculous errors — or did that flow naturally from the artist? Whichever, it’s brilliant. That sort of error — that makes velvet paintings what they are — cannot be easily done both consciously and well.

Once again, I am laughing out loud in my cubicle and my neighbors are thinking “what, another cat with bacon”. This is truly most excellent evil. Expect a call from Bad Horse in the near future, the Evil League of Evil needs men like John Scalzi.

Just think: as the internet evolves, the Wayback machine will preserve this moment forever. It will come to be the most visited node in the internet archive–floating to the top of the cache, vibrating forever in RAM rather than long-term storage, accessed by billions, and (eventually) trillions of weirdly post-human fans who visit it, a virtual shrine, day in and day out, and carve its likeness into Martian mountains, and beam it to distant galaxies, eventually genetically altering themselves so that they and all their descendents will possess a specialized neocortical organelle that superimposes this image in all its multi-pixel glory across their sensorium during even their most intimate moments…

This is now our unavoidable future. And you, Mr. Scalzi, YOU are responsible.

I do believe that this nominates you for Evil League of Evil. But your admission to that esteemed group is ensured by the fact that Velvet Wesley appears to be wearing Hello Kitty salmon-colored lipstick.

Wow, that IS evil. And awesome. Terribly awesome. Yet still evil somehow.

I’m just glad to know what the evil to be visited upon one of us turned out to be.

Good on you for sending that to him!

P.S. For the first time I’ve finally seen a piece of Star Trek/Wesley Crusher/Wil Wheaton related memorabilia that I can say, “You know, you keep that. I don’t really want one of those. Really.” Astonishing! :)